Systems used for controlling the operation of internal combustion engines have become fairly complex and continuous further development is induced—inter alia—by changes in the legislation with regard to fuel consumption, exhaust gas emissions. Further aspects are the general need to reduce production costs, and the current use of different system architectures in the systems of the powertrain of an automobile
Today, the engine control of a gasoline combustion engine (Otto engine) today is either based on gasoline direct injection (GDI) or multi-port fuel injection (MPI). Other types of engines are Diesel engines or flexible fuel engines, which are able to combust ethanol, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas (CNG), etc. A vast variety of engine control systems and functions exist as well as many different types of sensors and actuators used to implement the engine control. The set-up of an engine control unit (ECU) may be specific for each automobile manufacturer. Many different sensors, actuators, and communication interfaces usually have to be supported be an ECU, which for the greater part developed and produced by car component suppliers and not by the automobile manufacturers. Today, almost all control functions needed for engine control are provided by semiconductor devices, which are mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB) included in the ECU. Examples for such semiconductor devices are application-specific micro controllers (μC) with volatile memory (RAM) and non-volatile memory (NVM), transceiver devices for communication between different PCBs or ECUs, devices providing power supply, so-called smart power devices (intelligent semiconductor switches), power devices (power semiconductor switches) and various interface devices to connect sensors.
Particularly in engine control applications the information of various sensors connected to the ECU as well as the operation of many actuators is related to the crankshaft angle. therefore modern engine control algorithms need a precise angle information that is well synchronized to the timer used by the ECU. Usually, all angle-related signal processing is concentrated in a highly application-specific micro-controller that is arranged on the PCB of the ECU. Relocating at least some parts of the angle-related signal processing into dedicated “smart” peripheral integrated circuits, which are separate from the micro-controller may give rise to problems as commonly available techniques to connect two separate ICs (e.g. serial peripheral interface (SPI), Microsecond Bus)—at least for some applications—are not be suitable (with regard to transmission delay, data rate and real-time capability) to exchange high-resolution crank-shaft information between two separate ICs-